The Truth About “Romney Hood”
Posted by John Cassidy
The President wasn’t talking off the top of his head, though. In
attacking Romney’s proposal to cut tax rates across the board and scale
back some popular tax breaks, he and his campaign are citing a new study
I also mentioned yesterday, from the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan
Washington research institute. The study clearly says that Romney’s plan
would leave wealthy Americans considerably better off. According to the
three economists who authored the report, those lucky folks earning a
million dollars a year would end up taking home an extra eighty-seven
thousand dollars in income. By contrast, taxpayers earning under two
hundred thousand dollars a year would be hit with a tax increase of five
hundred dollars. And those figures are calculated on the assumption
that a Romney administration would eliminate many of the tax loopholes
enjoyed by the rich. If that didn’t happen, the report says, a Romney
Administration would have to take even more money from ordinary
Americans.
As you might expect, the Romney camp has dismissed the study as a partisan attack, calling it “another biased study from a former Obama staffer that ignores critical parts of Governor Romney’s tax reform program, which will help the middle class and promote faster economic growth.” The former Obama staffer is Adam Looney, who worked on tax issues at the Council of Economic Advisers, and who previously worked at the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to contributing to Tax Policy Center studies, he is currently the policy director for the Hamilton Project, a research institute established by Robert Rubin. That marks him out as a fiscally conservative Democrat, I suppose, but it hardly invalidates the study. Another of its other authors, William Gale, once worked at the White House for a Republican President: George H. W. Bush. The third author, Samuel Brown, is another veteran of the Federal Reserve. All three are acknowledged experts on the tax system.
The Tax Policy Center report stands on its own merits, which are considerable. Perhaps the most notable thing about the criticisms from the Romney campaign is that they don’t contain any refutations of any individual figures. Conceivably, that is because Romney’s advisers don’t want to get bogged down in a debate about fairness and equity. Much more likely, it is because they couldn’t find anything in the report that can be easily refuted. It’s yet another example of the Romney campaign paying a political price for its pandering and opaqueness. Romney only proposed such huge and irresponsible tax cuts in response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary. Since then, he’s refused to say in any detail how he’ll pay for them, which invites others to speculate about their distributional consequences.
As you might expect, the Romney camp has dismissed the study as a partisan attack, calling it “another biased study from a former Obama staffer that ignores critical parts of Governor Romney’s tax reform program, which will help the middle class and promote faster economic growth.” The former Obama staffer is Adam Looney, who worked on tax issues at the Council of Economic Advisers, and who previously worked at the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to contributing to Tax Policy Center studies, he is currently the policy director for the Hamilton Project, a research institute established by Robert Rubin. That marks him out as a fiscally conservative Democrat, I suppose, but it hardly invalidates the study. Another of its other authors, William Gale, once worked at the White House for a Republican President: George H. W. Bush. The third author, Samuel Brown, is another veteran of the Federal Reserve. All three are acknowledged experts on the tax system.
The Tax Policy Center report stands on its own merits, which are considerable. Perhaps the most notable thing about the criticisms from the Romney campaign is that they don’t contain any refutations of any individual figures. Conceivably, that is because Romney’s advisers don’t want to get bogged down in a debate about fairness and equity. Much more likely, it is because they couldn’t find anything in the report that can be easily refuted. It’s yet another example of the Romney campaign paying a political price for its pandering and opaqueness. Romney only proposed such huge and irresponsible tax cuts in response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary. Since then, he’s refused to say in any detail how he’ll pay for them, which invites others to speculate about their distributional consequences.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/08/the-truth-about-romney-hood.html
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